His Practical Unarmed Combatives and Martial Blade Concept videos should be part of your library to better understand the physiological potential of all your motions.
The esoteric aspects of martial arts training are beyond my expertise. I am a boring rationalist wearing a square hat. But the mysteries of martial arts run deep. I have seen masters perform minor miracles so – skeptic that I am – my mind remains open to the potential.
Kuji-in is not directly within the Aikido tradition, but it is an important part of classical Japanese martial arts. With Covid still preventing hands-on training, I offer this as a primer that may foster solo practice and a meditative tradition.
Katori Shinto-ryu: The Warrior Tradition (Otake, Risuke 2007) covers Kuji-in as part of the inner-teaching of Heiho, the art of war.
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Ninjutsu as promulgated by Masaaki Hatsumi follows the Buddhist traditional mudra.
Kuji-In, “Nine Syllable Seals,” is a form of meditation that encourages the development of the spirit, mind and body. It links hand postures – mudra – with chants – mantra – to enhance the practitioner’s focus. The following are the nine Kuji-In, their Japanese names and the developmental benefits:
RIN – Reinforces the positive aspects of the physical, mental and energetic planes.
Hands together, fingers interlocked. The index fingers are raised and pressed together. Sanskrit incantation is On baishiraman taya sowaka. The name of the mudra is dokko, “seal of the thunderbolt.”
KYO – Increases the healthy flow of energy.
Hands together, little fingers and ring fingers interlocked (often on the inside). Index finger and thumb raised and pressed together, middle fingers cross over index fingers and their tips curl back to touch the thumbs’ tips, the middle-fingers’ nails touching. Its mantra is On isha naya in tara ya sowaka. Daikongo, “seal of the great thunderbolt.”
TOH – Enhances your positive relationship with the universe, resulting in improved harmony and balance.
Hands together, index fingers cross each other to touch opposite ring fingers, middle fingers crossed over them. Ring and pinky fingers are straight. Tips of ring fingers pressed together, tips of pinkies pressed together, but both sets of ring and pinky fingers are separated to form a V shape or bird beak. The mantra is On jite rashi itara jiba ratanō sowaka. This is the “seal of the outer lion.”
SHA – Develops enhanced healing, regeneration.
Hands together, ring fingers cross each other to touch opposite index fingers, middle fingers crossed over them. Index finger, little finger and thumb straight. The mantra is On haya baishiraman taya sowaka and its name means “seal of the inner lion.”
Hands together, fingers interlocked. The mantra is On nōmaku sanmanda basaradan kan. The mudra is “seal of the outer bonds.”
JIN – Increases skills of communication, and knowing, and by extension telepathic ability
With your hands together, fingers interlocked, with the fingertips inside. Mantra is On aga naya in maya sowaka. Mudra is “seal of the inner bonds.”
RETSU – Enhances the perception and mastery of space and time.
Left hand in an upward-pointing fist, index finger raised. Right hand grips index finger, and thumb is pressed onto left index’s nail. Mantra is On hirota ki shanoga jiba tai sowaka. Mudra is “seal of the wisdom fist,” also known as “seal of the interpenetration of the two realms.”
ZAI – Fosters a relationship with the elements of creation.
Hands spread out in front, with thumb and index finger touching. Mantra is On chirichi iba rotaya sowaka. The mudra is “seal of the ring of the sun.”
ZEN – Results in Enlightenment, completeness, suggestive invisibility.
Hands form a circle, thumbs on top and fingers on the bottom, right hand overlapping left up to the knuckles. The mantra is On a ra ba sha nō sowaka. This mudra is “seal of the hidden form,” or more simply the “meditation mudra.”
Master Keating puts it all in proper perspective
Master Keating making it relatable
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I flirt with mantras and admit a slight fear of their power. While trekking in Nepal (1992), I purchased a ring I still possess, with the protective mantra written in Sanskrit – Oṃ Maṇi Padme Hūṃ – I was taught the mantra and recited it while hiking the Annapurna Circuit.
Oṃ Maṇi Padme Hūṃ – ॐ मणि पद्मे हूँ
The ring is of rather crude craftsmanship and I purchased it in Pokhara before embarking on the journey.
A pass in the saddle
The mantra purifies – om reduces pride and ego, ma jealousy and lust, ni desire, pad ignorance, me greed and possessiveness, and hum aggression. I was fresh from training at Hombu and was in prime physical condition so trekking the Himalayas carrying a 70+ lb pack seemed a minor effort. But I did not recite the matra effectively. My pride exceeded the strength of my ligaments. Traversing the Modi Khola ravine between Landrung and Ghandrung, my left knee gave out.
Its a frickin steep descent and climb between those towns!
In Ghandrung a Nepali woman gave me “Nepali medicine” to help my knee. She set a pan of salt water on a stove in which she soaked a rag and then bare-handed it on my knee. It was scalding! She laughed as I winced in pain – her hands inured to the heat from years of cooking. The treatment helped, but I could no longer carry my pack, so I hired a sherpa to carry my gear to Tadopani.
Arrived in Tadapani
Tadopani is “hot water” and a natural hot spring where I convalesced; soaking daily to recuperate my injured knee. Tadopani is a popular resting point – still low enough on the “apple pie trail” to have fruit provided by the mule trains and the hot spring is popular with the European travelers who soak immodestly, which attracts the young Nepali boys who flock to the pools to watch.
As close as I ever got
Tadopani is also close to the Kali Gandaki river. I had carried a commemorative coin from Gilbert High School, where my father taught, and threw it into the river so a part of Connecticut history may now be flowing to the Ganges in India.
Geocaching in a river
My trekking permit was set to expire and I had a scheduled flight to France, so I limped back to Pohkara and then back to Kathmandu. I never made it to Annapruna base camp.
Janus, the two-headed god looking both forward and back. 2020 was a tempting year to just forget. Ryan Reynold’s humorously captured the spirit when he produced this:
I love the clear Satan inspiration from Legend (1985)
Sure it’s a Match commercial but I am a sucker for its dystopian humor. The focus is on the impact of Covid and plays on the forced isolation, and then flips it on its head with the promise of finding love – a match made in Hell? Inversion to prove the universal – it’s fun, clever, and obvious all at once. We are laughing and grateful to have survived a mortal threat and are running up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as fast as we can!
I know I am desperate to just put it all behind, to look only forward after that royal shit-show!
But Janus looks back because what preceded defines what follows; Santayana’s “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
So what lessons can we learn from 2020?
Covid. Our common humanity. Covid is a painful reminder that a globally connected and highly integrated economy [1] is a great boon that comes at a price which every monoculture risks: the spread of disease. We have a shared human biology and isolation is impossible. We are all in jeopardy at the species level.
The incessant coverage of infection rates and the focus on the disparate impacts based on wealth (when has it ever been different?) all highlight inequalities but miss the binding common factor: we are all in this together. This should be the visceral lesson – more immediate and evident than Christ’s homilies – truly we are all children born of one god, bound to one another through our vulnerabilities. But to be reminded of our mortality is impolite – so most of us shut it out. We hide from any reminders of death.
Isolation. I know the challenge of cloistering with one’s immediate family, but I have a deeper empathy for those who have no family to shelter with – solitary confinement is inhumane.
Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beat or a god.
Aristotle, Politics
Isolation and training. I wrote a few posts on methods and suggestions. The absence of scheduled training time, I admit, lead to my own failure at maintaining discipline. I have been lax. No, absolutely slothlike, and – worse still – indulgent by using isolation as an excuse to excess. I have absolutely enjoyed the extra time with my family and am grateful that we have the financial security and a home sufficiently large to weather Covid without grave deprivation – just great inconvenience to an otherwise privileged life. I am grateful! It will take serious training to get back to pre-Covid conditioning.
Politics. Dangerous populist demagoguery. The polarization of America troubles me most. Trump poses the oldest question in democracy: why do we still fail to recognize the obvious threats of populist leadership?
Victor Hanson, a scholar I respect deeply, is an intelligent and articulate apologist for Trump. I admire Hanson’s dedication to the common-man thesis that Trump rode into office as well as Hanson’s lambasting the elitist isolation and “do as I say not as I do” moralizing hypocrisy that blinds them to Trump’s virtues. And while I understand his intellectualizing the Trump thesis, Hanson’s classical-tragic lens misses the deep psychology of Trump: the man is a megalomaniac and a pathological imbecile with none of the Sophoclean nuances Hanson ascribes to him.
I have close friends and family members who remain Trump supporters – and who fear the “socialist” Biden agenda. The rhetoric has descended to puerile levels and idiotic arguments. My fervent prayer is that some semblance of civil discourse will return in 2021.
I watch newscasts and shows (the Twilight Zone in particular) from the 1960s and am amazed at how intelligent the discussions were. Thinking back and remembering that the Greek plays and Shakespeare – subjects of deep collegiate scholarship now – were the HBO of their times, one might be seduced to believe the myth of mankind’s steady moral and intellectual decline (Spengler).
Yet we have our modern morality plays. The Avengers staged it best:
Defiance defended by the living incarnation of traditional American values
The scene poignantly is set in Germany – a clear reminder that we should be thinking about Hitler’s domination:
Loki: Kneel before me. I said kneel! Is not this simpler? Is this not your natural state? It’s the unspoken truth of humanity that you crave subjugation. The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life’s joy in a mad scramble for power. For identity. You were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel. Old German: Not to men like you. Loki: There are no men like me. Old German: There are always men like you.
The danger of the charismatic leader – Frank Herbert‘s eternal villain. Why are so many seduced? Tyler Cowen reviewed his most popular posts of 2020 and found this one was read frequently:
A well-respected German historian has a radical new theory to explain a nagging question: Why did average Germans so heartily support the Nazis and Third Reich? Hitler, says Goetz Aly, was a “feel good dictator,” a leader who not only made Germans feel important, but also made sure they were well cared-for by the state.
To do so, he gave them huge tax breaks and introduced social benefits that even today anchor the society. He also ensured that even in the last days of the war not a single German went hungry. Despite near-constant warfare, never once during his 12 years in power did Hitler raise taxes for working class people. He also — in great contrast to World War I — particularly pampered soldiers and their families, offering them more than double the salaries and benefits that American and British families received. As such, most Germans saw Nazism as a “warm-hearted” protector, says Aly, author of the new book “Hitler’s People’s State: Robbery, Racial War and National Socialism” [TC: I cannot find it on U.S. Amazon, try this German link] and currently a guest lecturer at the University of Frankfurt. They were only too happy to overlook the Third Reich’s unsavory, murderous side.
Financing such home front “happiness” was not simple and Hitler essentially achieved it by robbing and murdering others, Aly claims. Jews. Slave laborers. Conquered lands. All offered tremendous opportunities for plunder, and the Nazis exploited it fully, he says.
I am a believer in studying the extremes. Hitler’s Germany (extreme oppression and persecution), modern Haiti (a complete mess), and Yugoslavia in the 1990s (relapse from tolerance into murder) have a special hold on my attention in this regard.
And might you think that the German soldiers always followed orders? How about this:
In Auschwitz…there is not one case in the records of an SS man being prosecuted for refusing to take part in the killings, while there is plenty of material showing that the real discipline problem in the camp — from the point of view of the SS leadership — was theft [from arriving Jews and others]. The ordinary members of the SS thus appear to have agreed with the Nazi leadership that it was right to kill the Jews, but disagreed with Himmler’s policy of not letting them individually profit from the crime. And the penalties for an SS man caught stealing could be draconian — almost certainly worse than for simply refusing to take an active part in the killing.
Loki had it partially right, most people want to be told what to do and happily follow orders – even repugnant ones. Another very human trait – the desire to fit into society is so great that it takes moral courage to remember what is right. (Review again the making of a Unabomber. Thank you Harvard!)
It is easy to think that we would not be corrupted thus – surely I would never blindly be so evil. But I am too honest to be blithely righteous. I drive by the tents of the homeless and have no real empathy – I have no solutions and thus just want them to simply go away. My instinct isn’t to help, to provide aid and succor for the desperate and in need, but rather to retreat to a refuge of safety. Keep them away lest I too be infected and suffer a similar fate. The brotherhood of man lessons are all forgotten when faced with committing to a course of action to better everyone if it means giving up my family’s security and comfort: my charity is circumscribed by tax-deduction calculus.
So would I have been complicit within Das Dritte Reich? I wish I could defiantly assure myself that never! is the answer. All too easy an answer because it is the right one – but not necessarily the honest one.
Trump follows an august lineage of populist leaders that – for me – starts with Themistocles, continues with Julius Caesar, segues to Hitler, and leads to Trump. Much like Hitler, with Trump I am baffled at the evident physical ugliness of the man and the manifest charismatic impact they command. How, exactly, did Trump co-opt the power of the Republican party and foil the establishment? I watched it happen and am at a loss to understand it. The danger is palpable – the fact that martial law is even a topic of discussion should be clarion call for civil action in extremis: Flynn should be keelhauled! And yet many of Trump’s supporters gained nothing tangible from his rule: faith sustained by grievance alone.
Biden’s presidency we can hope swings the pendulum toward the center, but I fear that Trump is a bellwether of the demise of republican values (note the small “r”). The common cause of American exceptionalism is now but a dream – and one criticized by the radical left as an elitist institution.
Thus dies all republics?
Alexis de Tocqueville was prescient in his warning – a populous isn’t always violently cowed but its government is a more insidious process where:
It does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy, it prevents birth; … it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Remain vigilant. _____________________
My father died April 2019, the plague descended March 2020, and one of my oldest friends was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just as Covid hit. Death is very much present with me and my memento mori is the M3 in the driveway. Trying to outrun death? Undoubtably. But also, a wonderful tool to bond with my boys – celebrating life even as it reminds me of its inevitable end.
Concerns over Covid-19 started in March 2020 and at first we were very assiduous with protocols and quarantine. A late snow provided some added refrigeration for the extra food we stocked up on.
March 14, 2020
The snow was short-lived, leading to Spring and the eternal return. We have a rabbit warren under our deck – the cats watch them eagerly and inspired Kyrian to draw.
Dreaming of rabbits
Kyrian’s rendition
As the weather warmed, we all became more active. Heidi and I began walking on a regular basis and explored the beauty of our neighborhood parks. The scale of the trees in Oregon is impossible to capture with a camera.
Panning up to capture their height creates a wonderful distortion
On Mothers’ Day, we visited the Walk of the Heroines, where Heidi had honored her mother by adding her name to the wall in 2011.
Carla Jean DiGiovanni
With her boys at the Walk
In June, we enjoyed a long weekend at Cannon Beach – and we were not alone.
Not a unique idea…
In July we spent a long 4th of July weekend in Bend – again, it is impossible to capture the scale and majesty of the country with a camera.
It just has to be experienced
In early August, we stayed in Seaside for Kyrian’s dance competition – the beach town was packed with tourists despite Covid – and not everyone wore masks.
Throughout the summer, we continued our cul-de-sac basketball games – usually me vs Kyrian, but occassionally the boys went one on one
The highlight of the summer, was a trip to Michigan. The boys wanted something “normal” and the chance to see their cousin Aaron at Dad and Nancy’s meant we all risked flying.
School resumed online only.
One weekend the boys and I drove to Newberg to explore and happened upon Storr’s Smokehouse – some of the best barbeque we have found.
Repeat Customers
As the winter rains and short days descended, we all became more despondent. Heidi got a puppy
Boba
The Christmas to New Year break was challenging. We all spent too much time alone within the same house indulging in high-calorie food.
Portillo’s Italian beef sandwiches and Chicago pizza sent Fed Ex to celebrate
The boys played more video games and I found Titans and Doom Patrol to distract me. Only Kyrian was productive and he started to teach himself guitar.
Boba and Wit have become playmates/rivals
Looking back now, Janus would remind us that reflection itself is survival. 2020 stripped away illusions, about health, politics, even self-discipline, but left behind gratitude. The lesson is simple, if rarely learned: comfort is fragile, courage is choice, and memory is armor. Remain vigilant. Janus would approve.
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[1] The global economy is demonstrably old – spice and food goods were circulating in the Bronze Age – but the modern scale is wider and faster because of air travel. Viral vectors, like all good zombie and pandemic movies show, are necessarily quickly global.
